Demystifying application integration

Today, most enterprises first try an application service provider (ASP) by subscribing for a single hosted application. Often, this initial trial involves an application such as payroll, which typically requires a simple data transfer from the corporation to the service and back. As such, the integration required between corporate systems and the service provider isn't very demanding.

But as more hosted applications become available and companies realize the potential cost savings of outsourced applications, there's a need to ensure that in-house applications work with hosted applications. And as corporate customers begin to work with multiple ASPs, those companies will also require the various hosted applications to share data effectively.

Right now, the burden of integrating in-house and hosted applications falls more on the ASP customers than the ASPs themselves. Enterprises have a number of choices:

• Use in-house programmers, contract consultants, or programmers to write the necessary integration programs so that multiple programs can exchange information. Hopefully, the ASP's applications will have an appropriate application programming interface (API) to reduce the amount of manual coding required.
• Rely on the ASP's integration consulting and programming services.
• Find an ASP with applications that integrate seamlessly without additional coding.

ASPs are fully aware of the problem and eager to accommodate customers. In response to the reluctance of customers to roll out proprietary solutions, more and more ASPs are designing their applications to integrate seamlessly with existing corporate data.

This story originally appeared on CNET Enterprise on 2/05/01.Historically, enterprises--whether they have done it themselves or worked with systems integrators--have found that integration projects take more time and cost more than expected. ASPs are addressing these concerns with a variety of products and services aimed at easing the burden of integration. Agillion, in Austin, Texas, for example, offers a range of professional consulting services that integrate hosted applications with existing corporate apps.

Some ASPs are focusing on minimizing the amount of integration needed at their customers' sites. Corio, in San Carlos, California, has integrated common business applications (from suppliers including Commerce One, SAP, PeopleSoft, BroadVision, and Siebel) across its Orion Technology Platform. In this way, the integration and customization can be done once and deployed to many customers. Corio has taken a business objects approach and created a library of common business objects (for example, suppliers, purchase orders, and sales orders) that applications can exchange and interpret, whether they are hosted by Corio, Corio customers, or external providers.

The platform uses Business Object Exchange (BOX) technology so that businesses can use intelligent mapping to integrate existing legacy applications and information with the hosted applications. Corio's BOX uses predefined mapping to attach the attributes of an object so that all the data fields can be pulled into a new application simultaneously. Mapping technologies, which associate data fields from one program to another, have improved dramatically. New technologies provide intelligent, predefined mapping that reduces the need for manual mapping. As ASPs offer more tools, enterprise customers are spending less on consultants to help their integration efforts. Instead, many ASPs offer training for in-house IT staff on how to use the available integration tools. Particularly with large integration efforts, which include critical business applications or end-to-end integration, enterprise customers may have to train their employees on integration processes. Corio, for example, generally recommends two weeks of training on the Orion platform for business customers to do their own integration, rather than a more typical consulting scenario.

Other vendors are creating performance-monitoring tools so that businesses can measure, in real-world terms, the experience of users and more accurately assess the effectiveness of the integration. Candle Corporation's CandleNet eBusiness Assurance Network (eBAN), a managed information service, provides service-level metrics of users' experiences so that customers can better evaluate their ASP.

Every integration effort is challenging, since most business operations include massive amounts of information as well as complex applications. However, specific types of applications have unique challenges. Human resource and benefits applications, for example, need a solution that is accessible to the entire employee customer base, which requires the tightest possible integration. An employee accessing the system, for example, might want to get information from the human resource system (vacation time), the financial system (payroll information), and the corporate intranet (employee handbook). To create a successful experience, all of these systems must be closely woven together in a way that is seamless to the user. Financial services providers face similar challenges when they try to create a system with a 360-degree view of huge amounts of information while still maintaining security.Integration efforts--especially those dealing with large amounts of data--have been greatly facilitated by standards that allow databases to exchange data more freely. Strong database standards, such as SQL and ODBC, and the addition of APIs, which allow the applications to integrate with most databases, have simplified access to corporate information.

ASPs also depend on a number of developing standards, such as XML and RosettaNet, to provide common ways of handling data. With XML, you can describe a process, move data intact, and repackage information for specific audiences. RosettaNet defines and standardizes business processes that occur among business partners, including the exchange of information. Although these standards offer a common approach, they do not eradicate the need for hand-coding by customers.

The Internet Business Services Initiative (IBSI), an industry association promoting the development and use of Web-native business solutions, recently announced a set of standards to streamline interoperability among Web-based business-to-business services. The set of standard protocols supports a single customer sign-on so that customers can access multiple Internet business services without having to log on at each site separately. The protocols also support account provisioning that will define secured, industry-standard protocols for sharing user data between services. This way, customers will not have to enter the same information every time they subscribe to a new service.